457 



Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Ai^e 1039 



"Americans are apparently psychologically unready for peaceful coexistence and 

 need to best the U.S.S.R. in everything, " while the gigantic instruments that this 

 adolescent insecurity demands only "serve those who seek to preserve the America 

 of yesterday as it is confronted with the problems of tomorrow." For Norman 

 Mailer the American space program belonged to "odorless WASPs," "the most 

 Faustian, barbaric, draconian, progress-oriented, root-destroying people on earth." 

 The machine had become art, the astronauts plastic men; and NASA's dubious 

 accomplishment was "to make the moon boring." But Mailer equivocated. "For the 

 first time in history a bureaucracy had committed itself to a surrealistic adventure." 

 He vilified his own abominable army that debauched and dropped out while "they," 

 with cool discipline, "have taken the moon."^"* 



These attacks could be matched with enthusiastic affirmations of the space effort 

 and technological revolution from Buckminster Fuller, Krafft Ehricke, James 

 Michener, and others. But whether positive or negative, such comments fall into 

 two groups depending on whether their authors have interpreted the headlong 

 flight of technology in our time as an outside force challenging and perhaps 

 threatening historic cujture or as the expression and fulfillment of culture, at least 

 in the West. Is there a process of technological change that operates independently 

 of value systems that would help to explain why Europeans came to explore the 

 world and launch industrialism, or, indeed, why Chinese, Japanese, and Indians 

 are now in such a hurry to get into space? Did Great Britain already have to be a 

 "modern industrial culture" in some way for the factory system to spread, or did the 

 spread of industry help change dominant British values? 



We tend instinctively to assume that technological progress is a function of 

 national values. Industrialism is somehow "Western" and the Apollo program very 

 "American." But it is at least possible that our initial impulse is misleading. We also 

 tend to assume that governments devise strategy by identifying their interests 

 abroad and then marshalling the forces required to defend them. In fact, national 

 interests are themselves a function of power — they observedly grow and shrink 

 along with power potential, not vice versa. Similarly, the values of a given society 

 may be in part a function of that society's power over its environment. Did the 

 apparent power of command technology help to shape social values in the early 

 Space Age? Or did the political decisions giving birth to the Space Age express 

 something deeper and older than Sputnik, NASA, or the Cold War? Must the 

 United States already have been "The Republic of Technology" of Daniel 

 Boorstin's title, or the schizoid cult of hero and machine of John William Ward's 

 intuition of the meaning of Lindbergh's flight, for the space technological 

 revolution to have occurred?^** Have our inherited values, material or transcenden- 

 tal, fed the geometric expansion of power? And if not, if our once-sovereign culture 

 has become trapped within Ellul's technical milieu, then how did this metamorpho- 

 sis come about? 



In 1957, post-Sputnik American editorials drifted natuially between jeremiads 



'* Et/ioni, Moon Dogglf, Introduclion, 152; and Mailer. Fire on the Moon. 10, 21, 31. 131, 346, 441. 

 " Boorstin. The Republic of Technology (New York, 1978); and Ward. "The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight," 

 American Qiuirterly. U) (1958): 3-16. 



